Mount Saint Mary's University

What this program actually is

OrientationRecovery-model, multiculturally-grounded generalist counseling — the graduate program's mission is to prepare students "to apply evidence-based counseling practices and recovery oriented care in a culturally competent manner," and "recovery oriented" recurs verbatim across the Introduction to Counseling, Family Counseling, Community Mental Health and practicum course descriptions.

The distinguishing feature is ¡Enlaces!, and it is bigger than the word "certificate" suggests. ¡Enlaces! — "Counseling the Spanish-Speaking Client" — is not a concentration and not an add-on: it is a certificate embedded inside the MFT/LPCC specialization with no additional units and no additional time. It attaches to eight named courses totalling 24 of the degree's 60 units — PSY 227 Introduction to Counseling, PSY 274 Child & Adolescent Counseling, PSY 235 Group Counseling, PSY 236 Family Counseling, PSY 241 Couples Counseling, and all three fieldwork courses PSY 269A/B/C — which are "taught bilingually in Spanish and English," so students practice professional psychological terminology in Spanish in the same seminars where they learn the clinical content. ¡Enlaces! students are also required to "complete a clinical placement traineeship working with Spanish-speaking and/or bilingual clients," and the department's own 2026-2027 clinical training site list tags nineteen sites with an "(E!)" designation meaning Enlaces students are encouraged to apply. Admission is separate from admission to the degree: it requires "an interview with the coordinator and approval for the certificate," and adding or dropping it later requires a Registrar's Change of Emphasis form signed by the ¡Enlaces! Coordinator. One caution worth raising with the coordinator directly: the catalog says students "should be fluent in Spanish," while the program's own webpage says applicants "should be conversational in Spanish" — the two published standards do not match. As of the current cycle the ¡Enlaces! route can also be taken fully online, in synchronous live evening classes over three years, which is new and is the only fully-online path into this degree.

Structurally, the rest of the program is a conventional, competently built, BBS-approved 60-unit counseling curriculum with two quirks worth knowing. First, it is dual-license by design: the MFT and LPCC specializations share one course list, and the difference is essentially one course (PSY 234 Career Counseling is required only for the LPCC; MFT students take 3 units of PSY 290 Workshop or PSY 299 Independent Study instead) and the fieldwork hour count — 250 face-to-face hours for the MFT, 280 for the LPCC. Second, the BBS-mandated content areas are handled through zero-unit "B" companion courses bolted onto their parent courses and graded credit/no credit: PSY 202B Human Sexuality rides with Lifespan Development, PSY 241B Intimate Partner Violence with Couples Counseling, PSY 254B Suicide Risk Assessment & Intervention with Crisis and Trauma, and PSY 274B Child Abuse with Child & Adolescent Counseling. It is a tidy way to guarantee coverage without inflating units, but it means those topics are taught as attachments rather than as courses in their own right. Class sizes are small and published: "the average class size is 16 students," the maximum is 23, and "classes do not run with fewer than 10 students."

The third thing to weigh is that the entire final year is fieldwork, and there is no in-house MFT clinic behind it. Every MFT student completes a traineeship of 15–20 hours a week for three consecutive terms, and "most practicums occur during the daytime, so students may need to adapt their work schedule" — a real constraint for the evening cohort, who spent two years arranging their lives around 6–9pm classes. The university does run Counseling and Psychological Services with offices on both the Chalon and Doheny campuses, but its four advanced practicum slots are reserved for doctoral psychology students entering their second year or higher and are matched through SCAPTP, so MFT trainees are not placed there. Instead students choose from a nine-page approved-site list — roughly forty-six agencies across Central LA, the West Side, the San Fernando Valley, Orange, Ventura and Santa Clarita, many of them Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health contract sites — or propose their own with the clinical coordinator's approval. Personal psychotherapy is a graded requirement of the fieldwork year, not a recommendation: 25 hours, at least every other week, while enrolled in PSY 269A/B/C. Tuition for 2026-2027 is $1,210 per unit plus a $225 university services fee and a $115 graduate psychology program fee per semester, which puts the 60 units near $72,600 in tuition before scholarships; the university says all applicants are automatically considered for a graduate scholarship.

The program’s own page →

See it and hear it

The courses that define it

Every California program teaches law and ethics, assessment and a survey of theories. These are the courses that are not on every list — the ones that tell you what this particular faculty believes therapy is. The quoted text is the catalog’s own; the note underneath each one is mine.

The whole degree, term by term

What you would actually take, in the order you would take it. Sequences change; check the current catalog before you count on any single term.

60 units, delivered hybrid, with two published schedules. The evening track runs three years, Monday–Thursday 6:00–9:00 p.m., with each class meeting once a week in fall and spring and twice a week in summer; the daytime track runs two years with classes on Mondays and Wednesdays 9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. Both run fall, spring and summer every year (nine or six full-time terms respectively). Foundational courses come first, clinical courses second, and the whole final year is fieldwork. The ¡Enlaces! certificate can be taken on either schedule and, new for the current cycle, in a fully-online synchronous evening format over three years. The term grid below is the published evening (3-year) sequence, which totals exactly 60 units; the daytime 2-year grid on the same page lists only 57 units of coursework, with the remaining 3 units presumably the PSY 234 / PSY 290 / PSY 299 slot. course sequence ↗

60units in total

How practicum actually works

Californian clinical training runs in two legally distinct stages, and the difference decides what a program can and cannot do for you.

A trainee is a student. You see clients while still enrolled, at a site your program approves, supervised by someone the site provides. This is practicum, and it is the stage a program controls. An associate — registered with the Board after you graduate — is no longer a student, is usually paid, and is working toward the 3,000 hours the license requires. The Board renamed this stage from “intern” to “associate” in 2018, so any page still saying “MFT intern” is quoting something out of date.

Hours you bank as a trainee count toward the 3,000, up to a limit, which is why the size and quality of a program’s placement matters long after graduation: a student who leaves with 1,000 hours starts the associate years a third of the way through them, and one who leaves with the 225-hour minimum starts at the beginning.

Practicum is also where a degree most often stops being on schedule. Coursework runs on a calendar the school controls; placement does not. The questions that matter are therefore all about who owns the problem of finding you a site — and the answer differs enormously between programs on this list.

What happens after the degree →

There is no in-house MFT training clinic; students place themselves from a departmental list. The Graduate Psychology 2026–2027 Clinical Training Sites document runs nine pages and roughly forty-six agencies across Central Los Angeles, the West Side, the San Fernando Valley, Orange County, Ventura County and the Santa Clarita Valley, with each entry giving a named supervisor, phone, email and application instructions; a large share are marked "** DMH Contract," i.e. Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health contract providers, and nineteen carry an "(E!)" tag meaning ¡Enlaces! students are encouraged to apply though the site is not restricted to them. The published rule is that "each student can select their own practicum from a pre-determined list or suggest new sites with the guidance and approval of the clinical coordinator," and "all fieldwork sites must be approved by the department prior to the beginning of this practicum class" — so the department curates and vets, but the student does the applying, interviewing and negotiating. Load is 15–20 hours per week, and the program warns twice that "most practicums occur during the daytime," which is the sharpest trade-off in the evening track: two years of 6–9 p.m. classes followed by a third year that will probably require weekday daytime availability. The three fieldwork courses are taken concurrently with the placement and are sequential prerequisites of each other, and each carries its own hour target, so falling behind on client hours in the fall stalls the whole year. There is no published minimum for relational (couple or family) hours — MSMU is a BBS-approved program under the California Business and Professions Code rather than a COAMFTE-accredited one, so COAMFTE's relational-hour and observable-data floors do not apply here. The trainee-to-associate handoff is taught explicitly in the last of the three courses: in PSY 269C "students will also prepare for their future role as an MFT intern by developing their professional identity (creating their resume, practicing interview skills, applying for intern number) and exploring post-graduation professional development," and departmental policy requires every MFT student to join CAMFT or AAMFT-CA and carry malpractice insurance during the fieldwork year. source ↗

Will this degree travel

What the Board requires of any qualifying degree →

What it is, on paper

Enlaces! bilingual Spanish-English certificate embedded at no additional units; includes a Spanish-speaking clinical placement

The program’s own page →

What it costs

The figure below is the institution’s own, from its own page, with the year it applies to. Multiply the per-unit rate by the actual unit count and add campus fees before comparing it with anything.

$1,210 a unit 2026-27 — source

What a month costs to live on while you study →

Getting in

MSMU does not require the GRE or other standardized test scores for admission. source →

admissions page ↗

How its graduates did on the Board’s exam

Counting every attempt rather than only first attempts, the figure is 64% across 347 sittings here, against 66% statewide. First attempts are the fairer comparison — counting resits measures how many tries people needed rather than how many passed, and it penalises a school whose graduates keep going.

On the separate California Law and Ethics exam, 71% of this school’s 361 first-time candidates passed, against 80% statewide.

Recorded by the Board as Mount St. Mary's University, Los Angeles. Its list is kept by institution and its names lag: a school that has since renamed appears under the name it had when the candidates sat.

July 2018 - December 2024, pooled (13 semiannual BBS reports) · the Board’s published exam results by school →

What people say about it

Quoted where the wording carries the meaning, linked in every case, opening in a new window. The tags are my reading of each source, not a measurement, and the unflattering ones are here too.

What to ask before you apply

None of these are answered on a program page, and all five change what the degree is actually worth to you.

What I could not establish

Everything above is sourced. These are the things I looked for and could not establish - take them to admissions, and note how quickly and precisely they answer.

• The current catalog on MSMU's catalog platform is the 2024–2026 edition; no 2026–2028 catalog was published at the time of research, so course descriptions and the ¡Enlaces! certificate definition are from 2024–2026. The program webpage and the 2026-27 tuition schedule and training-site list are current.
• The two published Spanish-language standards for ¡Enlaces! conflict: the catalog says students "should be fluent in Spanish," the program webpage says applicants "should be conversational in Spanish." No placement test or proficiency assessment is described in either source.
• The ¡Enlaces! Coordinator is not named on any reachable page, and the certificate has no standalone webpage despite the FAQ referring to an "Enlaces website."
• The published daytime (2-year) course grid lists 57 units of coursework, three short of the stated 60; the evening grid totals exactly 60. The likely explanation is the PSY 234 / PSY 290 / PSY 299 slot, but the page does not say, and no term placement for it is published on the daytime track.
• Which campus MFT classes meet on is never stated. Graduate admission and most graduate psychology faculty use Doheny (10 Chester Place, downtown LA) phone extensions, and the program is described as hybrid, but neither Chalon nor Doheny is named as the class location.
• No cohort size, application volume or acceptance rate is published — only average, maximum and minimum class sizes.
• No relational (couple/family) hour minimum and no supervision-hour or observable-data requirement is published for the practicum year; the program is BBS-approved rather than COAMFTE-accredited.
• No independent student reviews of this program were reachable. MSMU has no GradReports profile, Niche returned bot blocks, and Reddit's search endpoints and every general web search engine were blocked from this environment. The two student voices above are university-published marketing testimonials and should be read as such.
• The licensing-exam pass rates in the FAQ carry no cohort year, denominator or exam cycle, and adjacent statistics on the same page are visibly out of date.